Book Reading #1 Design of Future Things

Design of Future Things
Donald A. Norman
Designed and Edited by Donald A. Norman

Chapter 1: Cautious Cars and Cantankerous Kitchens: How Machines Take Control

The author talks about various technological advances and the new kinds of machines that are being invented to help our lives. He talks about ideas such as cars that help to correct steering, rooms that wake you up and greet you in the morning, kitchens that regulate and watch what you eat and various other computer based appliances. However he does not just present the good points, he also talks about their downfalls and how they are not intelligent siting friends and co workers whom he has discussed these ideas with. His main example to show this is a car navigation system. He argues that the car can only give advice and there is no communication with it. He leads this into a discussion of the idea of a symbiotic relationship with machines. He gives this arguments in terms of four examples: people and traditional tools, horse and rider, car and driver, and machine recommendation systems. His main argument is not that these do not work it is that because there is a lack of communication between the two there is only so much that the non-human can understand. In essence, because machines lack true intelligence it will be very hard to determine what all interactions that people will have with them and this can pose many problems in design of future, similar technologies. He ends by discussing other machines and how they are designed. His focus is that while it is easy to program logic into a machine to make it do a task it is much harder to see all of the possible uses and consequences of peoples actions. The main idea is the idea of a programed house, while it would be nice for the house to be able to sense stress and help calm you, what if you need to get up in the middle of the night and it greets you good morning? He claims that the difficulty is not the logic, but tying emotion to different decisions and having the machine sense what we want them to do.



I think this chapter despite going over some of the same arguments twice does being forward some very interesting issues. The main one that I liked was the idea that design and actual implementation/use are very different from one another. I have found that in many new creations that the way or purpose that people use them for is not the same as the original creators image. In fact this does not have to be seen as a bad thing, it can be seen as a good thing. The way that I see this is that (essentially) people are beta testing my product by exploring its capabilities and then commenting on how the design fails or succeeds. In fact, when a new product is developed, the best thing one could do is first give it to a very select group that will use the item constantly and then have them give feedback and comments on what people say about it. Something like the self-following luggage (mentioned in the chapter) is a good example of this as people would see it and then ask where they got it and other inquiries. If a conversation were to get started about it there could be very good questions raised "How do you know if the luggage gets stuck? How do you know if someone has grabbed it or knocked it over?" These could be taken into consideration and then reversely used as selling points for the product (Hey, we beta tested this and this is what happens if someone tries to take it *alarm*). The creation of any new product or new idea needs to have some study go into it the problem is when companies try to compete with one another and push out products without acceptable levels of testing and life-threatening consequences arise. In fact again I will agree with the author that new technologies need to be designed based on how the user is going to use them naturally and not how the company WANTS the user to act.